


Midas

by ShastaFirecracker



Category: Torchwood
Genre: Fluff, M/M, Mild Hurt/Comfort, The Hub (Torchwood), hub fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-14
Updated: 2019-04-14
Packaged: 2020-01-13 06:31:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,559
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18463415
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ShastaFirecracker/pseuds/ShastaFirecracker
Summary: Fiddling with unknown alien artifacts never ends well, and yet they never, ever learn.





	Midas

**Author's Note:**

> I started this in 2009 and finished it ten years later. It was for a square on an LJ hurt/comfort bingo card - "unwanted superpower, sudden onset." No idea where the idea came from. Silly original-team hub story set some wibbly wobbly season 2ish time.

It had been a slow week. The high point had been Rhys bringing a homemade lasagna for lunch on Tuesday, which was sad enough, but then Tosh had let him tell her about different lorry models until Gwen finally shooed him out around three o'clock. It was now Friday morning, and even Owen was probably wishing for something as interesting as a lecture on haulage.

Ianto was in the Fg-Ft section of the archives, at a loss for new paperwork to file or, indeed, old paperwork with a tendency to mysteriously rearrange itself to sort out. He was halfheartedly going through old files that Tosh hadn't digitized yet and adding notations to his PDA regarding those that were clearly ridiculous and ought to be thrown out to make room for legitimate cases. He'd just pulled out a file labeled “Fhtagn, Cthulhu” and rolled his eyes at it when the biohazard alarm sounded.

The archive's blast doors didn't rumble shut within the first ten seconds, so the threat probably wasn't airborne, mobile, or identifiable by their current technology as airborne or mobile. Ianto thumbed his comm and asked, “Hello? Jack, Gwen?” No immediate response, but Ianto didn't worry yet. They'd had so many false alarms from a bored Owen's experiments in the greenhouse during the last month that biohazard contamination S.O.P. was becoming alarmingly routine. Ianto hurried through the maze of tunnels and file cabinets, grabbing the emergency kit from inside the door back into the Hub proper just in case.

Flashing red lights reflected off the water tower, creating a disorienting strobing effect. The siren itself turned off almost as soon as Ianto walked out onto the Hub floor, leaving only the strange silence and the lights.

“Gwen?” he called into the comm again. “Anyone?”

Tosh's face peeked out over the railings of the upper walkway, and Ianto breathed an involuntary sigh of relief. “Up here,” she called. “It's Jack, it's... I have no idea. Bring Owen's scanner?”

Ianto's stomach clenched. Jack. Wonderful. He didn't doubt Jack's ability to survive anything, but that didn't mean he liked watching it happen, or dealing with the messes afterwards.

Scanner recovered from beneath the remains of Owen's breakfast, Ianto sprinted up the spiral steps to Jack's office. Gwen, Tosh and Owen were all gathered in a huddle by the railing, as far from the glass walls of the office as possible, but seemingly stunned into insensibility by whatever was going on inside.

At first, with the red lights still flashing, he didn't know quite what he was looking at. Jack lay crumpled on the floor, clearly dead, but the area of floor immediately surrounding the body was oddly shiny. Not a pool of blood – not liquid at all. The floor itself was simply worn incredibly smooth. And it was... yellow?

“Owen,” he said, holding out the scanner. Owen took it automatically, but only seemed to notice it a second later. “Tosh, could you fix the lights?” he asked.

“What? Oh,” she said, and tapped a few buttons on her ever-present PDA. The red lights stopped; the normal lights dimmed for a moment, then righted themselves to full brightness.

Ianto stared with the rest of them. The floor around Jack was a buttery, metallic yellow. His chair, one corner of his desk, and a scattering of what Ianto could only assume were papers were also rendered in the same state. Jack's lips sparkled under the fluorescent lights, and his clothes looked as though they'd been spray painted. The only thing in his immediate vicinity that wasn't transformed was a small object lying near his right hand.

“We filed that artifact last week, didn't we, Ianto?” asked Gwen at last, looking at the little cube.

“I think so,” said Ianto. “Yeah. Is that...?”

“Owen,” said Tosh.

“What?” he said, tearing his eyes away from the almost tangible aura of wealth emanating from Jack's office. “Oh. Yeah. Give me a sec. I'm going in.”

“Owen!” said Gwen.

“Keeping my distance,” he said, raising his hands placatingly, then adjusting his scanner and creeping towards the door.

“Is that...?” Ianto repeated.

“Yes,” said Tosh. “Apparently everything he touched turned to gold. Before he... um.”

Ianto took a deep, controlled breath. “Why?” he asked, trying not to sound accusing.

“Fiddling with unidentified artifacts,” said Gwen. “Like an idiot. I mean, it's been so dull. He hasn't even yelled at the Prime Minister in over a fortnight.”

Owen waved for their attention. He'd propped the door open and was standing just inside, scanning Jack's body. “The bling lining his lungs,” said Owen, holding up the small screen, “is worth over ten thousand quid, I'd guarantee it.”

“I'm sure he'd be thrilled,” said Ianto dryly. “Why, pray tell?”

“I think it's what killed him,” said Owen. “It's not only what he touches that turns to gold – it's everything that touches him. Including dust and microscopic particles in the air, which he breathed in until his lungs weighed him right down off his chair and prompted the new floor plan. I want to try something.” He went over to a bookshelf, edging carefully around the gold patch of floor, and pulled down a thin, old volume. “The gold isn't spreading and it seems to only work within a contained radius. I want to see if it still works now he's dead.”

“No,” said Ianto, alarmed, looking at the book in Owen's hand.

“What?” Owen snapped.

“Not the Verne,” said Ianto, pointing to the book. “Toss the Dan Brown on him.”

Owen rolled his eyes, went back for the other book, and returned to the body.

“Okay,” he said. “One, two...”

The book landed with a thump on Jack's chest and then slid off to the floor. It remained, obstinately, a book.

“Probably safe to touch him,” Owen said, but he made no move to do so.

“There's no telling when he'll revive,” said Gwen. “Safer not to.”

“He may not revive until his lungs are clear,” said Tosh.

“He's either ejected or metabolized foreign substances in his lungs before,” said Owen.

“I think we need to put him in a sterile environment,” said Tosh. “Or else he'll keep dying of the particulate buildup.”

“He'll starve, though,” said Gwen, sounding worried. “It's just like King Midas.”

“This technology in greedy hands, temporally misplaced... It could be the basis for the Midas story,” said Tosh. “And the drive behind lead-to-gold alchemy. We've seen things like that before.”

“Can we discuss ancient astronaut theory _after_ we figure out how to move Jack without touching him,” said Ianto.

“Secondary objects appear to be fine,” said Owen, pointing to the desk. “You see how the desk itself is partly gold but the things on top of the gold bit aren't. He must have touched the corner of the desk and that stack of papers directly, but things touching the desk were unaffected.”

“Shit,” said Ianto.

“What?”

“Finance reports I'll have to redo.”

“Well,” said Owen. “We can move him with... poles or something.”

“Are you saying you want to poke him with sticks, Owen?” said Gwen, giving him an exasperated look.

“No,” Owen said defensively. “Maybe. Look, we could use gloves, hazmat suits, but the risk is high. We'll want to keep a distance.”

“Tosh, do you still have that carbon parachute nano-thing?” asked Gwen. “Just the fabric.”

“It isn't really a fabric,” began Tosh. “And I need it for –”

“It's strong, though,” said Gwen. “We can roll him onto it and drag him downstairs.”

“Because that's so much better than poking him with sticks,” said Owen.

Gwen ignored him. “We'll have to put him in the tank. It's the only place where we have complete control over the environment.”

“I don't think it got cleaned after the visit from the Cthonian ambassador,” said Tosh doubtfully.

“Oh, it did,” Ianto deadpanned. He'd had to throw his second-favorite suit in the incinerator.

Gwen rubbed her temples and huffed. “Look, just... let's just do it, all right? The sooner he's contained the sooner we can concentrate on fixing this without worrying about being turned into statues.”

-

The tank was a freestanding cell, the usual Hannibal Lecter glass with airholes replaced by a solid sheet. Its vent system was off the rest of the grid and could be manually regulated, and the tank itself could be filled with nearly any liquid or gas mixture to support lifeforms that couldn't live in an oxygen-based atmosphere. Tosh had designed it after a couple of messy miscommunications, which, incidentally, had also cost Ianto various bits of wardrobe afterwards.

Tosh set the air scrubbers to full and laid out a sterile tarp in the cell in the hopes that Jack would only turn that gold and not the floor beneath. Replacing bits of the cell if they got transmuted would be expensive and tedious.

With Jack laid out in the tank, there wasn't much to do except hover around Tosh while she scanned and studied the artifact Jack had been holding – taking extraordinary care not to touch it. She was tense and monosyllabic, worried for those pieces of her equipment that by necessity had to be touching the artifact to do their jobs, and after the third time Gwen had asked if she'd found anything out, she'd snapped at them all to leave her alone.

Owen slunk away to Jack's office, presumably to take better stock of their new and unexpected wealth. Gwen watched him go, glanced at Ianto and rolled her eyes. He quirked his lips up as a reflex, but he couldn't really smile. Gwen's eyes softened and Ianto looked away, unaccountably irritated. He ought to go and redo the reports that were now lying like bricks on the floor of Jack's office.

“Come on,” said Gwen, taking him by the elbow, and with a little sigh he let her lead him downstairs to the morgue, the cells, and there at the end – the tank.

Gwen and Ianto stood side by side, staring into the glass box. Jack lay in the same position as he had in the office, stiff with rigor mortis and lung-shaped lumps of heavy metal. Ianto sighed more audibly and crossed his arms. Gwen tilted her head slightly to the side, as if she were standing in a museum looking at a slightly perplexing piece of modern art.

“Well, this is just fantastic for a Friday,” she said dryly. “I hope Tosh gets it sorted before five. I was going out tonight.”

“So were we,” said Ianto, furrowing his brow at Jack as if in mild disapproval of his inconvenient death.

“Yeah? Dinner, club, film...?”

“Dinner,” said Ianto. “He's absolutely impossible in a cinema. Like a five-year-old.”

“I would have thought more like a horny teenager,” Gwen snorted. She tactfully pretended not to see Ianto's faint blush.

“You?” Ianto asked.

“Me what? … oh! Dinner as well,” said Gwen. “Rhys said he wanted someone else to cook for once, since I never do.”

“I thought he liked cooking?”

“Oh, he loves it. Watches all those shows with trendy chefs traveling the world, always wants to try to make something new. He wouldn't really want me to cook, anyway – best I can do is boil pasta and open a tin of tomatoes on it.”

Ianto snorted.

“So where were you going?” Gwen asked casually, staring at her boss's corpse. “Rhys and I were thinking that new Bangladeshi –“

Jack heaved a massive breath and jerked like a fish on a line.

“Giovanni's,” said Ianto. “Friday's date night in theory, but we've only gotten in two in the last six weeks.”

“Mm,” said Gwen.

Jack rolled over onto one hand and started up a hacking cough that sounded as if he were trying to spit up a hairball. The moment the skin of his palm touched the tarp they'd laid down, a ripple of butter-yellow began to spread from the point of contact. It traveled fast for about half a meter, then slowed until it was barely creeping outward along the edges.

“I haven't been to Giovanni's in ages, Rhys always vetos because he does a lot of Italian at home.” Gwen rolled her eyes. “Do they still do that chocolate-almond thing, with the caramel bits - ?”

“Yes, and Jack refuses to share.”

Jack's hairball cough had turned into a thin, oxygen-starved retching. His whole body convulsed.

“I always mean to try something different but I can't help it,” Gwen sighed. “God, now I'm hungry. Oh, I think he's got it.”

The last was with a nod to Jack, whose fists clenched, white-knuckled, against the gold tarp. He convulsed one more time and with a heavy clank a lump of gold the size of a satsuma hit the floor and rolled a couple of inches.

“That was absolutely disgusting,” Gwen called into the tank.

“Fucking hell,” Jack wheezed, collapsing and rolling onto his side, looking exhausted. His eyes tracked over his sleeve, then the ball he'd coughed up, then the floor. “What am I _wearing?”_

“That's what you start with?” Ianto asked.

Jack coughed, awkwardly reaching up to rub his sore throat. He rolled onto his back, and the aura of transmutation followed his every shift, spreading gold along the tarp by increments.

“Careful with moving,” Ianto said. “Don't touch anything but what's beneath you.”

“Not getting up,” said Jack. “I feel so heavy. Why do I feel heavy?”

“Your clothes are made of gold.”

“What?” Jack tried to sit up, struggling onto his elbows. His clothes wrinkled and crumpled with his movements, folding along every new concavity. As he curved forward, a rip tore through the back of his shirt, and one sleeve sloughed away. Ianto should have considered the fact that a sheet of gold as thin as worn cotton would be as fragile as wet tissue. Jack picked up the “sleeve” and stared at it for a moment before balling it up in his hand, squeezing the malleable metal into a disfigured blob. “Pure,” he said hoarsely. He looked reasonably impressed.

The rest of his shirt fell off.

“I liked that shirt, though,” he sighed.

“I recommend not standing up,” Ianto said sagely.

“Nothing you haven't seen before.” Jack looked up, grinning. His lips were still flecked with gold speckles, making him look either like he'd just come from a monochromatic rave or chugged a whole bottle of Goldschläger. He arranged himself to be more comfortable, bare elbows propped on his knees, and took a steadying breath. It came back out as a hacking cough. It sounded thick, like a bad chest cold.

“Jack?” asked Gwen, stepping to the side and studying him carefully.

“It isn't just the clothes,” he rasped. “Still feel heavy. What happened?”

“You tell us,” said Ianto. “You were fiddling with that cube Gwen fished out of the bay last week. Tosh's readings said it seemed dormant, and we all agreed it'd be best not to try to trigger it.”

“Oh,” said Jack. “Yeah. I was trying to trigger it.”

Ianto rolled his eyes up and closed them, unmistakably a prayer for patience.

“I knew it was familiar and I thought I remembered the tech,” Jack said. “Molecular rearranger. Limited transmutation, one simple element to another – one in, one out. Wanted to see what the settings were.”

“Settings?”

“Which element in, which element out,” Jack clarified. “They can't be reprogrammed, they only ever do the same one to one.” He touched his fingers to his lips and pulled them back to look at the gold flakes on his skin. “This one is... I don't even know.”

“Defective?” asked Ianto.

Jack shook his head slowly. “This is complex technology for one of these things. I think it's working as intended. I just can't imagine the intent.”

“We were already wondering if it was a King Midas sort of thing,” Gwen said. “Could it have been meant to fool people, prove a miracle?”

“Time travelers, taking advantage?” Jack asked dryly. “Never heard of such a thing. God... my head is really pounding.” He leaned his forehead down against the backs of his wrists, crossed over his knees.

“Jack?” Ianto asked quietly. “What's going wrong?”

He took in a labored breath. “Heavy,” he said. “Head, stomach, chest...” He let out a shaky breath. “I see... what you did... with the sterile air, but...”

“But _you_ aren't sterile,” Ianto concluded.

Jack groaned. “I'm dying again. I can feel it.”

“Talk while you can,” Gwen said quickly. “Whatever you can think of to help Tosh and Owen figure this out.”

“Uh,” Jack wheezed. “Miners used these. Builders. Could be used to harden and reinforce foundations.”

“Mints?” Ianto asked. “Creating currency?”

“Not usually. Heavy restrictions on types of elemental shifts. Simpler elements worked better.” Jack's voice was getting thin, terribly strained. “Devices... proportionately unstable to the... instability of the atom.”

“A time, Jack,” Gwen pushed, “or a race, a galaxy, anything searchable.”

Jack could barely breathe. His legs slid out from under his elbows and he collapsed onto his side. His lips were turning cyanotic blue. “Nyxian,” he whispered.

At the last moment, Ianto looked away. After a moment, Gwen's hand settled on his arm. “Come on,” she said. “We've got to talk to Tosh.”

-

Half an hour later, Ianto hurried back down into the cell block. He slowed as he neared the tank, unsure at first if Jack was still dead. He was still lying on his side in the same spot, but Ianto felt sure that the positions of his arms had changed slightly. He watched, and thought he saw Jack's chest expanding in a weak breath.

Ianto walked around the tank to see Jack's face. He stepped up to the glass and leaned his forehead against it. “Jack?”

Jack gave a faint affirmative hum.

Ianto knelt and then sat, a little awkward on the hard concrete, cross-legged. He leaned into the glass again. “We may have a solution,” he said. No response. “Jack, can you look at me?”

Slowly, painfully, Jack dragged his eyes open and focused on Ianto sitting not two meters away. His face looked bruised and blue-tinged, a bit like it had when he'd stayed dead for days after Abaddon.

“Solution,” Jack croaked.

“The thing is, you _should_ be sterile by now. If the device were distinguishing between atoms that are Jack and atoms that are non-Jack, and turning the latter into gold, then they should all already be gold and you would have expelled them after a resurrection or two. That's how Owen cracked it. It isn't just targeting inorganic molecules in contact with the organic molecules that make you up. It is targeting a single element, but in combination with an isomorphic entanglement protocol.”

Ianto watched Jack's face. He could see Jack putting it together.

“Carbon,” Jack whispered. “Carbon to gold.”

“None of us are anthropologists,” Ianto said, “but my guess was it's meant to turn bodies into statues. A burial rite for royalty, or god-kings, maybe.”

Jack focused on breathing for a moment. His eyelids slid closed and it was clearly a struggle to open them again. “I'd take a clean headshot any day,” he mumbled.

“Jack,” Ianto said, pressing his hand to the glass. “Look at me.”

Jack focused. His position looked so uncomfortable, although that was surely the least of his discomforts at the moment.

“Tosh is trying to see if the entanglement can be reversed, but Owen reckons that bringing another carbon-based life form into contact with the cube while you're dead should reset the isomorphic bond.”

“Who,” Jack whispered.

Ianto shook his head. “A lab rat,” he said. “If that doesn't take, then maybe a weevil. Poor form for animal rights ethics, I suppose, but it's them or you.”

Jack exhaled slowly.

“So we need you to die one more time, Jack,” Ianto said, wishing he could get closer. “I'm sorry.”

Jack managed to keep his eyes on Ianto, even as his eyelids drooped again and his breathing slowed to almost nothing. Ianto's stomach twisted, imagining touching him – his skin would be hard, half his cells converted to metal by now. Cold to the touch.

“I'm here,” Ianto said, hunching in on himself, reducing the world to the space between him and Jack. “I'll be here when you wake up.”

Jack's slow exhale ended. Ianto held his breath, counting, until he had to give in and inhale. Jack's eyes were completely vacant, fading to dull.

Ianto thumbed his comm. “He's gone, Owen.” He heard a tinny confirmation, a shuffling, a squeaking; he winced. The cube was inside a cheap plastic bin, hopefully soon to be an expensive golden bin, inside one of the high-risk storage containers, ready to be sealed against atmospheric conditions up to the surface of the moon or the inside of a volcano. All that was left was to put the rat in the bin and entice or punish it into touching the cube.

A minute passed. Two. Ianto thought the comm line was dead until Owen hissed with sudden pain and Tosh's distant voice objected to something. Ianto thought he caught Gwen's voice commanding, “Stop poking it.” Then -

Jack heaved in a breath at the same moment that Owen yelped an expletive in Ianto's ear. “Ianto,” Owen said a second later, “we've got a solid gold rat sculpture here, how's things on your end?”

“Alive and kicking,” Ianto said, smiling with relief.

“Don't go in there yet,” Owen warned.

“I'm not daft. Will the remote scans do for testing?”

“Should do. Get him to touch some different stuff, we'll get the readings up here.”

Jack had gotten his oxygen-starved gasping under control and was finally taking deep, steadying breaths, sitting up, looking shaky. “What happened, exactly?” he asked. “I know something about a rat, but half my brain was gold at the time, I think.”

Ianto laughed. “Can you stand?”

“Gimme a second.” Jack was always a little wobbly on his feet when he first came back. He rolled to his knees, then levered himself upright and only staggered a little bit.

“Radius looks good here,” Ianto said, watching the oblong ring of gold around Jack's feet.

Over comms, Tosh said, “Hasn't changed an iota.”

“Move towards me,” Ianto said to Jack.

He obliged, but of course Ianto realized belatedly that his trousers were still made of gold leaf, and Jack's stride was enough to do them in. Jack was grinning when he stepped up to the glass.

“Radius hasn't changed,” Tosh said.

Ianto sighed. “In a fair and just world, you would not be watching the CCTV right now.”

“I can tell you we're not if it'll make you feel better,” said Gwen.

Ianto made a long-suffering face at his stark naked boss. “Touch the glass,” he instructed.

Jack could, of course, have touched one palm to the glass like a sane man, but instead he stepped closer and pressed his whole body against it. “All good?” he asked, voice all innocence.

“Seems to be in the clear,” said Tosh. “I'll release the tank seals from here.”

A clunk and a hiss, and then Jack was making his way towards the exit of the tank, Ianto following him on the other side of the glass. Jack stepped around the corner and all of a sudden Ianto was very much close enough to see that his lips no longer had a fleck of gold on them. He must have reabsorbed it all as it reverted to his normal, living cell structure.

Jack raised a hand. “Dare me?” he asked, grinning.

Ianto hesitated, then reached out and touched Jack's palm, bracing himself. Nothing. Just warm skin on skin, and Jack tangling their fingers together, laughing.

“I hope you understand,” Ianto deadpanned, “that you have been an utter idiot and that you do not get rewarded for your behavior.”

Jack gave an exaggerated pout. “Do I get rewarded for surviving?”

“You did not survive,” Ianto said, “so no.” He let go of Jack's hand and turned to leave the basement. Jack followed after him, cajoling.

“I, uh – I contributed to petty cash pretty heftily here, any reward for that?”

“You've artificially inflated the gold market. No reward for being an economic disaster.”

“How about the fact that I would've made a great statue? You have to admit I look damn fine in gold.”

“Couldn't say, seeing as you were mostly blue.”

“Ugh. But seriously, Ianto, are we still on for dinner? I could eat a horse.”

Ianto rolled his eyes to the ceiling. By the time they emerged from the lower levels, the rest of the team had conveniently vacated the premises. Ianto suspected they were still around, just getting out of the way of a newly resurrected, overly excitable, nude Jack.

“If you will put trousers on, we can go for a curry. I don't feel like taking you anywhere fancy anymore.”

Jack traipsed ahead of Ianto just enough to half-turn and give him an exaggerated faux pout, although his irrepressible dimples and laugh lines gave him away. Ianto allowed him a look of fond exasperation in return, and Jack grinned and bounded up the stairs towards his office and a change of clothes. “I could definitely go for spicy,” Jack called, banging his door open. “Get the taste of metal out of my mouth. Hey, there's a new Bangla-” He kept talking on his way to his bunk, but the door shut on him, muffling his voice to the point where Ianto couldn't make it out.

Sighing, Ianto thumbed on his comm. “Gwen? Still around?”

“Umm hi, yeah, just up in reception about to leave. Owen and Tosh are still about, just keeping a distance.”

“Yeah,” said Ianto. “I have a feeling we'll be seeing you and Rhys at the restaurant shortly.”

“Ooh, a double date?”

Ianto sighed heavily. “Looks like.”

“We can go bowling after!”

Ianto looked to the heavens for patience. “See you soon, Gwen.” He turned off his comm in the middle of her laughter.

He idly picked up around the place until Jack emerged from his office, blessedly clothed but looking no less overly pleased with himself. Jack clanged down the stairs, hollering to the rafters, “We're gone, Tosh! Lock her up for the night and don't do anything I wouldn't do!” Grinning, he reached Ianto and snatched the anti-static cloth he was using to clean the monitors out of his hand, tossing it over a random keyboard. “Mr. Jones?” he said, offering an elbow.

Ianto thought about how much work needed doing now, in terms of collecting and assessing their new gold hoard, cutting away ruined bits of furniture and repairing floors, redoing reports, sterilizing the tank... and he shoved it all out of his head, let the warmth of Jack's infectious cheer wash over him, and decided that even bowling with Gwen and Rhys might not be a terrible way to celebrate being alive. He took Jack's arm, pulled him in for a fast but promising kiss, and then said, “My flat tonight, and we're coming in late tomorrow.”

Jack's eyebrows did their thing. “No reward for bad behavior, huh?”

“It'll take time to punish you properly,” Ianto said, arranging his face into a complete neutral.

Jack's grin got even more blinding. “Excellent plan, can't just let me get away with things like this,” he said, and elbow in elbow they walked out into the evening.


End file.
